AuthorTopic: [Solved] Installation Recommendations? (Read 6481 times)

Hello, I was looking for some recommendations regarding which options to choose or any advice that could be given that would help me install Vector Linux better. I already have it installed, but because my machine is quite old and because I'm afraid I might have chosen some wrong things during installation, my computer crawls at a snails pace and I can't really do anything useful without waiting about three minutes for a window to show up or close. So I'm thinking this is probably my mistake and I'm wondering if there are any specail settings that I could adjust during or after installation. Currently, I'm running VL 5.8-standard-gold. I followed the instructions in the documentation, but I think I must have made a mistake.

My Specs are:

Pentium III (1 GHz)128 MB SDRAM40 GB hard drive

Tell me if I need to give you any more information. Thanks in advance for the help!

uelsk8s is correct: it should be very fast on that machine - besides udma is that a western digital hard drive and if so if it is the only hard drive in that machine did you ensure the jumper is removed for "single" operation - because if you don't you can get VERY slow response such as that.

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"As people become more intelligent they care less for preachers and more for teachers". Robert G. Ingersoll

VL 5.8 Std is very fast on a 1 GHz computer. Does it shut down properly, or does it hang and not cut off? If it won't shut down you might add "acpi=force" as an extra boot parameter when prompted during the re-install.Choose ext3 as your file system. Linux swap partition should be around 500 MB. You might wanna double your RAM, because 128 MB is a bit low, but that doesn't account for the sluggishness you report.

Hello everybody, Thanks for the replies! I actually got it figured out and it was something stupid on my part. Somehow the settings got messed up and it was opening multiple window managers on F7 through F9 on startup. I got it fixed though. Thanks for your help and sorry to waste your time!

Wow, that would explain the poor performance! Glad you got it straightened out. So.... How does that 1 gz run now? I have a 1gz as well. It's true VL doesn't run as fast as it did on my dearly departed 2.4 gz, but I can't complain at all about the performance on this 1 gz.

nubcnubdo:

You said to use ext3. I'm using reiserfs (I've no clue why). Could I expect better performance with ext3?

After consulting some benchmarks, I've decided on reiser as well.But who knows... some benchmarks also show different results, use different tests, measure different things.

Apparently, reiser can give you a boost for large numbers of small files.Mostly, I just went to reiser because of something I read on the gentoo documentation.

(Although, personally, I'm getting tired of all this performance tuning... I know my processor is fast and my hard drive is slow, and that more RAM makes my work and fun more pleasant. Other than that, I find myself wasting time making changes that have no effect other than a placebo one)

FWIW, I detected a pretty noticeable slowdown when I decided to reformat and try ext3 for a time in a previous life... err... laptop, lol. It was a 2.8 GHz P4 (non-HT) with 512 MB RAM and 40 GB 5400 RPM HDD.

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O'Neill (RE the Asgard): "Usually they ask nicely before they ignore us and do what they damn well please."http://joe1962.bigbox.infoRunning: VL 7 Std 64 + self-cooked XFCE-4.10

Heh, I was talking about speed there, lol. But now that you mention that little incident, it was the perceived slowness of ext3 that brought me back to the ReiserFS fold (though I've dabbled in XFS a bit, after it was included as an option in the installer). Never had a problem since, even inside a vm running in winders, which required the 5 sec power switch pressing (not to mention BSODs) at least 2 or 3 times a week...

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O'Neill (RE the Asgard): "Usually they ask nicely before they ignore us and do what they damn well please."http://joe1962.bigbox.infoRunning: VL 7 Std 64 + self-cooked XFCE-4.10